3 man Eve lander

[Mefi282]

Hi,

I already did a journey to Duna and now i'm wondering how it is possible to return from the surface of Eve. I already have a bus to go there with 3 parts: kerbin departure stage, interplanetary&Eve departure stage and crew vehicule. The thing that i still need to have is a lander. I did experiments with asparagus staging but i didn't even get to a Kerbin orbit. And my probes are telling me that Eve has even a highter gravity. So i'm asking you as a community how have you done your manned Eve landing?

[CalculusWarrior]

I haven't even attempted an Eve return mission, and I've played around with SSTOs and visited most of the other planets. Taking off from Eve is extraordinarily hard; you'll need at least 10 000 m/s of delta-v in order to achieve orbit.

That being said, a one-way mission is really easy, as Eve's thick atmosphere means parachutes are more effective than usual, so you can land large payloads with few parachutes.

If you want to return from Eve, and with a 3-man capsule no less, you are going to need a lot of asparagus staging. I've only seen single-man Eve return missions myself.

[tomf]

I have an eve 2-man sea level return lander, I originally wanted a 3 man version but the mass just exploded too quickly. If you land at one of the highest points of eve you should be able to do it though. My 2 man lander has a couple of vertical stacked stages and then a ring of clustered aerospike asparagus stages and a ring of mainsail asparagus stages.

[Eleven]

I have an eve 2-man sea level return lander, I originally wanted a 3 man version but the mass just exploded too quickly. If you land at one of the highest points of eve you should be able to do it though. My 2 man lander has a couple of vertical stacked stages and then a ring of clustered aerospike asparagus stages and a ring of mainsail asparagus stages.

.craft file please

[RocketBlam]

Yeah, I found using a 1-man lander can to be practically impossible from a whole-mission perspective. I designed the craft with much difficulty, flew the mission with even greater difficulty, and returned to orbit only by the skin of my teeth.

An Eve return is not a trivial matter.

[Blue]

Making the mission come down in seperate parts simplifies things, like how Scott Manley did it in Eve or Bust. Coincidentally I had the same plan, though I didn't execute it with the same as his expediency:

A large mission rover, crew drop pod, and a return launcher. Only the return launcher needs to actually be able to leave, which makes it much simpler in terms of engineering, what to do with the other things. (Make them as big as you please, and just leave them on the surface when you're done with them.)

Also like Scott Manley, I made my return launcher mobile, on a set of 8 of the largest wheels, so that it could transport itself to a higher elevation and/or more stable ground once it had landed on Eve. The highest point on the planet is a mountain 7km high, which reduces the atmosphere enough that the Delta-V budget goes down to about 7.5km/s to reach orbit.

[ScottyDoesKnow]

Edit: just realized this thread was resurrected from a year ago.

Here's my Eve return mission: http://imgur.com/a/JEeCM

It can currently return from any altitude on Eve with a 1.6t payload. But I just tossed a 3 man can on the top instead and it was able to return from the coordinates in this post with over 1400dV remaining. Check the top left of the first picture in that post for the actual coordinates.

The version in the album is something like 2200 parts. The new version (0.23.5) is 775 parts but I don't think I've run a full mission with it so use it at your own risk: Eve Return V3 Mk 08.craft (requires MechJeb)

Edited April 8, 2014 by ScottyDoesKnow